1d ago

Is communities discovery really that bad, do we just miss enough people, or should people revisit their expectations and go for more general communities?

Kind of a companion thread to the recent one on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com asking people which community there were missing.

I had a quick look, and most of those seem to be niches that can't be filled until we reach a higher population.

There is still maybe some potential improvement about some less well-known community that other people are interested in and that could some additional activity.

I try to help to make less known communities known with the regular threads on !newcommunities@lemmy.world (now moving to !communitypromo@lemmy.ca ), but there is probably only a level of detail we have to stop at with 47k monthly active users.

One example is !jrpg@lemmy.zip, it seems reasonable active, and is probably a better compromise than having each game having its own community.

Similar with !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works, or !showsandmovies@lemm.ee. I posted a thread about Ted Lasso a few days ago, it got some nice comments, but probably not enough to have a full fledged dedicated community.

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83 comments

Community discovery 100% needs to be improved somehow. No matter how many popular posts you make you will heavily struggle getting the ball rolling, if you ever do.
This practically guarantees the death of niches, which is [obviously] not good for the fediverse as a whole.
- Don't people use the Subscribed feed for their niche communities? So once they are subbed, it's all good?
  If the issue is people not knowing about communities, then those posts on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca should help
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule influences this heavily imo
  I think it's both. On latin for example i have 120 users (35 are lemmy federate bots) but i'm the only one posting there, despite some posts getting a lot of upvotes or comments.
  This can heavily discourage mods and force them to quit which kills the community.
  
  Not everyone follows that though
  
  Then I'll keep posting about it everywhere I guess
  
  Just followed it
  
  My reflex moving over was to subscribe to everything I’m interested in and never use all, because I’ve never used it on reddit.
  This created a problem where since lemmy’s sorting all basically sort by most popular (except scaled but that sort is problematic for other reasons), I basically only saw the meme and news communities I subscribed to on my feed and the niche stuff never made it.
  I know @Aurelius@lemmy.world is working on an algorithmic alternative !quiblr@lemmy.world but it’s not got support on any apps.
  
  have you tried Scaled sort? I use Scaled for my subscribed feed and it does a great job showing new posts in niche communities
  
  Yes, I have several accounts due to that issue. Comes back to the lack of personal feeds mentioned elsewhere.
  
  Oh! Today I learned about community promo. Yeah, I guess we could use awareness raising about the existence of that community. Sounds like an awesome resource.
  
  I posted it on !newcommunities@lemmy.world, is this were you heard about it?
  I'll probably post on !youshouldknow@lemmy.world next week, and probably !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca as well.
  Maybe create a meme about it on !fedimemes@feddit.uk too.
- Is this a community discovery issue, though? If it's a popular post in an unpopulated community, people must be seeing it. So, it doesn't sound like an issue with impressions.
  It's an issue with conversions. With visibility not translating unto subscriptions. And that's a totally different problem. If I see a post in Local or in All, and it's interesting, I'll upvote it, but that's not going to get me to subscribe. For that, I need to a) be interested in the community topic according to its name (because I am not clicking into the community), and b) I need to see multiple interesting posts from that community. And if those thresholds are reached, and I subscribe, that doesn't secure my engagement. Just that you'll show up in my Subscribed feed.
  All of those are hurdles for a nascent community, and neither are a discoverability issue.
  There could definitely be better ranking options for feeds, but if the posts in question are already "popular", that doesn't seem to be the issue.
  
  I guess fxomt misphrased "how popular". You can have a "quite popular" post for your community (let's see, more than 100 upvotes), it will probably never break through the rest of the posts as people generally use Top Day or 12 hours.
  Frontpage on LW is currently at 400 for the latest post: https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=TopDay
  
  fxtom
  😆
  But this what I meant, yes.
  
  Sorry, edited!
  
  Yes those are points I forgot to mention. And the first one was what I meant.
  
  People will only see it if someone from their instance is subscribed to that community though, so even popular posts don't necessarily reach the All feed.
  
  https://lemmy-federate.com/ solves that for most of the instances.

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